Mastery of Mystery

Robert Morris is such a common name that some museumgoers think there are several Robert Morrises. There is the one whose grey Fiberglas L shapes won a prize at the Chicago Art Institute in 1966, and the one whose knifeedged I beams starred in the Guggenheim Museum's sculpture show last year. Then there is the Robert Morris who electrified Buffalonians at the 1965 Festival of the Arts by a "dance" in which he and a female partner inched across the stage, locked in embrace and clad only in mineral oil.

All these adventures were, in fact, initiated by the same Robert Morris, 37, a Buster Keaton-faced Kansas Citian who teaches at Manhattan's Hunter College. He is renowned in avant-garde circles as both the creator of bafflingly simple minimal sculptures and the author of still more baffling tracts in their defense. What seems to bind together Morris' dance, sculpture and writing is one fact: he is apparently dedicated to the proposition that clarity is square.

Early Morrisiana includes such wily visual conundrums as a bronze box secured with a padlock, the key to which is inside the box. His recent show at Manhattan's Castelli Gallery began with 15-to 50-ft.-long hanks of handsome industrial felt, sliced into strips and dangled weirdly from the walls. In later weeks, the gallery showed cold-rolled steel and aluminum mesh bolted together with immense authority--into impossibly useless, pointless, outsized shapes.

Morris, of course, maintains that his aim is to demystify the viewer. Says he of his sculpture: "You don't have to explore it. The information is given at once." To him, the appeal of felt is twofold: its shape depends on how it is draped. Secondly, felt comes naturally in heather, maroon and buff (Morris refuses to color his metal works, since paint creates "a second skin").

Paradoxically, the very directness of Morris' sculptures is what flummoxes gallery goers. If they follow his advice not to explore the work, they will shrug and leave. If, on the other hand, they ignore him and study the work, they will find it witty, ironic, subtly allusive. One lady collector recalls that, when her companion strolled toward one of Morris' grey Fiberglas doorshapes in a gallery, she suddenly felt compelled to call out "Stop." "I don't know why," she says, laughing nervously, "but it was almost like a man violating a woman." She has since bought a large Morris for her garden.

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